Medical Pall

Published on May 03, 2017

The cost of operating Dr. Luke Lampton's family medicine clinic in Magnolia has doubled or tripled since 1999, he said, but his passion for medicine has paid an even higher price.

“Even after hiring a nurse practitioner,” Lampton said, “we're spending less time with patients and more on a bureaucratic system of measures that has nothing to do with saving peoples' lives.”

As chair of the Mississippi State Board of Health and editor of the Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association, Lampton mingles with enough physicians to know that many are overwhelmed by a system in which the joy of practicing medicine is slowly dripping away.

“Physicians have a sense of powerlessness,” Lampton said. “People in suits are getting in the way of patient care and they're doing it to save money.”

Physicians aren't the only professionals who endure work-related frustrations and bureaucratic burdens; but to the nation's doctors, the hurdles are now high enough to foster a level of burnout and stress so pervasive it has been labeled a “health-care crisis.”